Khrushchev : how he emerged as leader

• Kruschev's early government reforms

  • Replacing Stalin's supporters with his own people, using his position as Secretary of the Central Committee to replace senior officials throughout the party
  • between 1953 - 56 replaced around half of the regional party secretaries and 44% of the Central Committee
• Kruschev's anti-bureaucracy campaign


  Proposed cutting bureaucracy by devolving power from the Soviet government to republican governments, restructured government in mid 1954 cutting the number of central Soviet ministries from 55 to 25, the proportion of Soviet industry controlled by central government dropped from 68 to 44%
• De-Stalinisation


  Khrushchev and Malenkov wanted to 'humanise' communism by ending Stalin's use of terror, enhancing the lives of Soviet citizens, and enriching Soviet culture, they rejected the cult of personality around Stalin
• The secret speech


  Khrushchev negotiated with the Praesidium to present his criticisms of Stalin at a secret session of the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956, he argued that Stalin abandoned collective leadership and set himself up as a dictator, placed himself above the party, and ordered the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people
• Ending terror


  In May 1954, Khrushchev and Malenkov set up a special commission to review the cases of political prisoners, in 1956 51,439 prisoners, including 26,155 political prisoners, were released, by 1961 half of those who had been executed by Stalin had been rehabilitated
• Khrushchev's criticisms of Stalin caused a series of problems, including communist parties in Hungary and Poland beginning their own process of de-Stalinisation, and unrest in the Soviet Union as leaked information about Stalin's crimes was shocking and caused some to question the legitimacy of communist rule
• Democratisation and decentralisation


  • Allowed the expansion of party membership
  • introduced fixed terms for senior communists to ensure they were replaced regularly
  • abolished some of the central ministries that oversaw the economy
  • devolved power to 105 newly created economic councils
• Khrushchev's final reforms


  The Twenty Second Party Congress of 1961 introduced fixed terms for all jobs within the party, including a fixed 16 year term for Central Committee members, the party was split into two halves, one in charge of agriculture and the other industry, in the hope of boosting economic growth